LUCTUYMANS(b. 1958)Waiting.Signed and dated "Luc Tuymans '90" on the reverse. Oil on canvas.12 ⅛ x 18 ¾ in. (30.8 x 47.6 cm).Executed in 1990.Provenance
Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp"For my Generation, television is very important. There's a huge amount of visual information which can never be experienced but which can be seen, and its impact is enormous. I think it's almost impossible to make a universal image. One can only make bits of images. Existence looks edited. For an artist like Gerhard Richter, the fight for true painting against photography was very important; for me it's much more interesting to think in terms of films, because on a psychological level, films are more decisive. After seeing a film I try to figure out which single image is one with which I can remember all the moving images of the movie. Painting does the opposite; a good painting to me denounces its own ties so that you are unable to remember it correctly. Thus it generates other images. One shouldn't be able to remember the real size of a painting because that's the very core of its power. Before I paint, the image already exists; sometimes it's an image whih is memorized and so there's a mimetic element, which could also be very filmic." (Luc Tuymans taken from U. Loock, J. V. Aliaga, N. Spector and H. R. Reust, Luc Tuymans, London 2003 p. 12)

In Waiting, one can see Luc Tuyman's statement substantiated into a tangible object. The work, comprised of a thinly applied oil on canvas has a strong cinematic quality. The depicted scene is just slightly out of focus very much like a film placed on pause. When first approached, the painting evokes the same feeling as one would have when arriving five minutes late for a feature film. There is a sense of something happening, we are caught up in the moment yet we do not know what has brought us to this place or where it will take us. Where is the woman coming from? Who is the male figure waiting for? Her?

Aesthetically, the work is emblematic of Tuyman's style. The background and figures are suggestively rendered without being too detailed. "There is a sort of indifference in my paintings which makes them more violent, because objects in them are as if erased, cancelled. I am not a material painter, I mean I do not use a lot of paint…Every painting differs, even if only by a millimeter (sic). When the painting is framed it evens itself out. The visibility drops and a kind of gloominess appears on the painting, a sort of second skin" (ibid., p. 26). It is this "gloominess" that works to heighten the work's undeniable emotional charge, evoking questions and a sense of unease.